What's the "doozy"? The insidiousness nature of inaccurate and inconsistent data.
Any event's ability to use data, even at the most basic level is predicated on the quality of the data being collected. No data set is going to be perfect. There is also the ongoing challenge of missing data. That said, even a reasonably accurate data set, including a few errors, can be tremendously insightful.
One place where you cannot afford too much bad or even missing data is your ticket revenue reporting. Mainly if most of your ticket sales are generated online.
Yesterday, I identified a potential online ticket revenue reporting problem between Google Analytics and a client's ticketing vendor.
On Thursday, the client's ticket revenue data was under-reported in Google Analytics versus the ticketing company's reports. Yesterday, ticket revenue was over-reported by 30%. Thus far today, ticket revenue is over reported by 5.88% in Google Analytics.
What's worse, are the inconsistencies of the online revenue reporting. It's not under or over-reporting, it's both and to varying degrees.
In case you were wondering, "yes!" the ticket revenue reporting was tested multiple times before tickets went on sale to the public. All the test sales were spot on in both the ticketing platform and Google Analytics.
To make matters worse, it's the weekend, and the ticketing company's department for troubleshooting issues won't return to work until Monday.
Ultimately for the client above, their most crucial reporting metric is how much revenue from ticket sales is ending up in their bank account. As long as the net ticket sales and bank account deposit reconcile. The data is perfect ... and it is pristine at the moment!
Here' today's takeaway ... if you're going to use data to make smart decisions regarding your event, make sure that you quadruple check the accuracy of that data. Stay vigilant before, during, and after your event. Especially when something within the system changes. You're not looking for perfect, but reasonably accurate. Because "reasonably accurate tracking is better than no tracking at all!"
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